MYSTERY WIRE — This week marks the 73rd anniversary of the beginning of the modern UFO era. It’s an event that is now commonly called the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting.
The Arnold sighting happened on June 24, 1947. Private pilot Kenneth Arnold said he saw nine, shiny unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier in a row at speeds he thought was at least 1,200 miles an hour (1,932 km/hr).
After he reported this sighting and it gained some public attention, numerous sightings were reported over the next two to three weeks. Arnold’s description of the objects also led to newspapers of the time using the flying saucer and flying disc along with UFO.
The public’s interest in UFOs was obvious. Many people wanted to know more about UFO sightings and many also wanted to share their own sightings. Over the decades several organizations have documented UFO sightings, including the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) which has been around since 1969.
This year, 2020, many of the regular conferences and meetings normally held have been cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But people have been gathering to listen, discuss, even argue their beliefs on UFOs.
With this week’s revelation that the U.S. congress has acknowledged the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force at the Office of Naval Intelligence, UFOs are once again back into the mainstream media headlines.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio introduced legislation in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 to create a new UFO-related program that would collect information about close encounters between the U.S. military. and unknown intruders. The document is also the first time congress is acknowledging the existence of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force.
Lawmakers ask for unclassified UFO report in new intelligence bill
Similar studies have been conducted by the pentagon, mostly in secret. Mystery Wire has spoken with the person who designed one of those programs.
Dr. Hal Puthoff is a brilliant physicist who’s held top secret security clearances so he could advise the CIA and Pentagon about cutting edge science topics including psychic phenomena and UFOs.
Puthoff was the chief scientist for Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), a private contractor based in Las Vegas, which spent years studying UFOs for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
AATIP, AAWSAP and BAASS: An authoritative history
In his first-ever public appearance about the secret study, Dr. Puthoff explained why the DIA considered UFOs to be a threat to national security. “The major threat they were concerned about is future threat,” Puthoff told us. “What happens if a potential, terrestrial adversary – say the Russians or the Chinese or whatever – achieves some significant breakthrough and develops game-changing, disruptive technologies based on their evaluations of the phenomena. Or maybe from sensor data? Or from crash-retrieved materials? That’s what they were really worried about.”
The secret study Dr. Puthoff oversaw was sponsored by former U.S. Senator Harry Reid and two colleagues.
In the presentation Dr. Puthoff gave in 2018 in Las Vegas, he revealed many new details of his work.
You can read the transcript of Dr. Hal Puthoff’s entire presentation from June 9, 2018 below.
The SSE is no stranger to the subject of UFOs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena is just a new acronym for UFOs. Back a couple of decades ago, Peter Sturrock, one of our founding members of SSE (Society for Scientific Exploration), arranged with Rockefeller to hold a week-long workshop at the Rockefeller residence. We brought in the best of the UFO researchers, and then a panel of independent experts, and had a week long discussion of physical evidence related to UFO objects of which there’s a significant amount of data and Laurance Rockefeller hosted the whole thing. It was it was a wonderful meeting. Eventually, after publishing in the SSE journal, Peter Strurrock put together a book, UFO Enigma, and it is still one of the best books you can find out there to take a look at what are the physical aspects of UFOs that researchers have uncovered. However, the government also is no stranger to the UFO phenomena. Anyone who follows a field would be familiar with Project Sign, Grudge and Blue Book. But in 1969, the Condon Committee shut it all down and said, Really, we don’t need to be involved in this area anymore. We’re not learning anything. We’re not getting anywhere. It’s not clear that this is a significant area. And so for the average person on the street, that’s when it all kind of ended at least serious government interest. In fact, that’s not true. The very memo that shut down Blue Book, written by General Bolander had as part of its language reports of UFOs, which could affect national security would continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedures designed for this purpose. Nonetheless, as far as the public was concerned, that was it. I mean, even the Air Force Public Affairs Office put out circulars all the time in response to questions saying, no, while we gave this up in 1969.
What, in fact, did occur was that there were programs going on behind the scenes anyway, as required by the Bolender Memo. Now, most people didn’t know about these programs, they weren’t advertised, they weren’t responded to, FOIA requests usually went dry. But that all changed last December, when the New York Times published a front page story on how there was this program, investigating this area, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. It was deeply buried. But the New York Times had good sources, and they came up with information about the program. And so there’s been a lot of publicity about it. Since the New York Times broke the story, Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, it’s been picked up all over the place. And one of the reasons why it’s attracted attention at this point, are the quality of the sources going public. Ex-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is the one who initiated the program. Top Rated F-18 pilots who encountered advanced aerospace vehicles at close range, were permitted to come forward and tell their stories, which up till now they hadn’t because they didn’t want to lose their flight status by reporting what they had found, at least publicly. And a number of significant Department of Defense and intelligence community officials have come forward to talk about the reality of this phenomenon. And the fact that there were programs going on. The program was nicknamed Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, AATIP. People have trouble trying to get documents out of the Pentagon by saying they want all documents in AATIP. And they have a hard time because that wasn’t actually the name of the program. The top name, there is the actual name of the program. But AATIP was a nickname it went by. It began in June of 2007. The Defense Intelligence Agency was concerned about the fact that obvious observation had shown in advanced aerospace vehicles, crafts or drones of unknown origin were flying all over the United States over waters, in fact, globally, is the case. And so a congressional budget was approved to address the issue behind the scenes. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid from Nevada was the one who was the initiator of the program, joined by Senator Inouye and Senator Stevens. These are the people who generally approved programs that were in the black under high security behind the scenes. And so they set up this program Senator Reid has not walked this back since all the news came out. He’s been very forthright. And given a number of interviews. This particular statement sort of captures at all, “We don’t know the answers, but we have plenty of evidence to support the questions. This is about science and national security. If America doesn’t take a lead answering these questions, others will.” Well, there’s a twofold nature of the threat. First of all, you got these advanced aerospace vehicles flying around, that we don’t know where they come from, who’s driving them, what the intent is, possibly offworld, even. But the future threat was actually as far as the Department of Defence went, and the intelligence community, one of the greater concerns. What happens if potential adversaries achieve significant breakthroughs by getting hold of advanced technology either based on their study of the phenomena, or from sensor data or crash retrieved materials, then that could provide a problem for the United States and in this sense of threat. And there’s reason to be concerned about that. This is a document in the program we dug up out of the Soviet Union. It’s a very thick document. It shows that the Soviet Union had a massive program also trying to get to the root of all of this, and in this document, a number of research institutes and military institutes are listed. And of course they had the same concerns we did. Is there a threat from the phenomenon? Or might the Americans make headway before us and that’d be a threat.
Just to give you an idea of what’s being observed, which many people have seen, because it’s been in the news a lot lately, back in November of 2004, a Nimitz carrier group was out on patrol off of San Diego. And on several occasions an advanced aerospace vehicle would descend rapidly from 60,000 feet to 50 feet in seconds, and then hover and then take off like a bullet. When it first happened and happened over a number of weeks actually, two F-18 pilots were vectored onto the site where they were being observed by the radars to investigate. And what they saw was what they call the Tic Tac craft. Solid white, smooth, no edges, about 46 feet in length. Uniformly colored, no nacelles, pilots, or wings. The F-18s could not obtain lock with their radars because they were stealthy, but forward looking infrared radar could pick them up to some degree based on their heat signatures. And the advanced aerospace vehicle appeared to demonstrate advanced acceleration, aerodynamic, and propulsion capability beyond anything that that we knew existed on the planet. I’m gonna play FLIR video that many of you may have seen. I’ve got sound with the video.
You might ask yourself, like, what can you prove from a videotape? I mean, you can see videotapes all over the internet and so on. But this was data fusion, their gun camera tapes. They’re these videotapes from the pilots, voice recordings, Data Link recordings from Aegis and many other military platforms, expert witnesses. So in fact, the data density and this is what’s changed the field a lot. Our detection capability has gotten so advanced that we’re losing our inability to see exactly what’s going on. FLIR displays were recorded. There are detailed debriefs of the pilots. In that original New York Times article you can see a page long debrief of Dave Fravor. Key assessments: the advanced aerospace vehicle has no known air vehicle inventory of US or foreign nations, as far as we can tell. Low observable characteristics are stealthy. They exhibit advanced aerodynamic performance that we can’t imagine how they do it and recognize that these are infrared tapes from the pilots. So if there was some kind of hot propulsion gases coming out the back you would have seen it but we don’t see that. They had the advanced capability to remain stationary and then take off like a shot. Dave Fravor says was like somebody suddenly shot a bullet. So how do we respond to this, the Defense Intelligence Agency put out a broad area announcement. In fact, it was unclassified. They wanted to evaluate 12 potential threat areas with regard to these advanced aerospace vehicles. There’s a list of exactly what you would think you’d want to know about lift, propulsion, signature reduction, human effects, and so on. Now, it turned out that anyone, any aerospace corporation could apply, could send in a proposal, DIA chose Bigelow Aerospace as a contractor to address the threat. Now, there’s been buzz on the internet about Okay, well, Senator Reid came from Nevada, and Bigelow Aerospace is in Nevada. So it wasn’t this just some sweetheart deal. In fact, that’s not the case. It was a broad area announcement anybody could go for it. Bigelow was actually a good choice. He’d spent a lot of his own money, because he’s interested in this area up to this point, investigating the phenomena. And he had the best proposal. And so he was tasked, and so he set up a special organization called Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Study. So we call it BAASS to do all the things you’d expect the program like this to do. Well, BAASS contacted me at Earthtech International, to collaborate as a subcontractor. And I agreed to do that. Okay, what did I address as a subcontractor? Well, one of the critical issues is that there’s so much high level security and compartmentalization in this subject area. And there’s a lot of it, it’s difficult for contractors to obtain expert opinions on advanced technologies, because they would expose why they are interested. So I acted as a surrogate, I was contracted to commission mostly unclassified white papers from experts around the globe. Where their particular aerospace related subject areas would be in 2050. As like a general survey of aerospace futures, I decided this would be the best way to get the best knowledge we had across many technologies without actually exposing why we wanted to know. So I let out 38 contracts over a two year period. I’ll show you what the studies were on. You can read them there. Positron aerospace propulsion. IEC fusion as a compact energy source, warp drive, dark energy, extra dimensions, metallic glasses for aerospace use, really cutting edge kinds of things. Here’s some more of the papers that I commissioned, negative mass propulsion, anti gravity for aerospace applications. And so on. Programmable matter, invisibility cloaking. These are just the kind of things that we needed to have maximum technical input from the best people around the globe. And so that’s what we did. That’s what I did.
Now, we could wait, we told these people, they could publish their reports in physics journals and engineering journals. But of course, the contractor didn’t want to wait for that. So the Defense Intelligence Agency bundled up these 38 papers, and put them out as Defense Intelligence reference documents posted on a JWICS (Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System) server that anyone in the government or contractors could get access to. By and large, I have not been released to the public, they had a couple of leaks. So let me give you an example of well, how does this stuff help people who are chasing these really difficult problems? I’m choosing one here: metamaterials for aerospace use. I’d love to talk about really fancy materials, but they’re classified. However, there’s a lot of materials that have been picked up or provided even in the public domain. I’m going to give an example because it shows exactly what the structure is for how to deal with this. This is an open source sample. It was sent anonymously to talk show host Art Bell. The fella claimed to be in the military. He said that this sample was picked up in a crash retrieval, and so he sent it by email. So what does that mean chain of custody? Nonexistent. Provenance questionable, Could be a hoax. Could be some swag off of some foundry floor or whatever. However, it was an unusual sample. So we decided to take a look at it. It was a multi layered bismuth and magnesium sample. Bismuth layers less than a human hair. Magnesium samples about 10 times the size of human hair supposedly picked up in the crash retrieval of an advanced aerospace vehicle. Looks like it’s been in a crash. The white lines are the bismuth. The darker areas are the magnesium separations. So the question was, what about this material? So naturally, we looked in all of the national labs, we’ve talked to metallurgists, we’ve combed the entire structure of published papers. Nowhere could we find any evidence that anybody ever made one of these. Secondly, some attempts were made to try to reproduce this material, but they couldn’t get the bismuth and magnesium layers to bond. Thirdly, when we talk to people who, in the materials field who should know, they said, We don’t know why anybody would want to make anything like this. It’s not obvious that it has any function. Well, years later, decades later, actually, finally, our own science moves along, we move into an area called metamaterials. And it turns out that exactly this combination of materials and exactly those dimensions, turn out to be an excellent microscopic waveguide for very high frequency electromagnetic radiation, terahertz frequencies.
So the wavelength is 60 microns, which is a pretty small size. But it turns out that because of the metamaterial aspect of this material, those bismuth layers that act as waveguides, can be 1/20, the size of the wavelength, and usually when you make a waveguide, it’s got to be about the size of the wavelength. So in fact, this turned out to be a material that would propagate sub wavelength waves. Why somebody wants to do that, we still don’t know the answer to that. But anyway, it was amazing that we’ve gone through this and this is the kind of structure we go through a lot, you get a material sample of the unusual characteristics to be evaluated. The method of manufacture is difficult to assess or reproduce. The purpose of the function is not readily apparent, as with our sample here, and then as our own technical knowledge moves forward, we finally see a possible purpose of function comes to light. That sequence is repeated over and over in this particular area. I’ll pick a second one here. For the engineers, the physicists in the crowd are probably more interesting. Spacetime metric engineering, this happened to be the paper that I myself provided. One of the questions is, can the report anomalous observables of these advanced aerospace vehicles be accounted for in the basis of known physics? I mean, you hear people describing craft, taking right angle turns at high speeds and other things with the hovering and rapid acceleration and so on. As if the craft didn’t have any inertial mass. Well, it turns out, although Einstein’s general relativity is usually used in astrophysical applications and gravity studies and so on, you can look at it from an engineering standpoint. So if you take an engineering approach to general relativity, what I just showed, can be, can be understood. If you could change the space time metric the way general relativity does, I’m talking about textbook not some fanciful physics. You could even get faster than light travel, a (inaudible) warp drive. Warp drive as in Star Trek. Again, you might think that’s a fanciful kind of thing, but that paper was published in one of the top general relativity journals, Classic and Quantum Gravity, the warp drive hyper fast travel within general relativity. So if you engineer space time metric, you can begin to line up observables with physics that we know in love even if we can’t reproduce it. What about the velocity of light constraint? People are always saying that you know, how could you have a wormhole you let you go from one side of the universe of the other arm to beating the speed of light? What does the physicist and engineer mean but speed of light, he means this little equation here with speed of light, is given by one over the square root of the permittivity times the permeability of the vacuum. So the point is, if you re-engineer those vacuum parameters, then you can make the effective speed of light higher in the engineered region. And so those are the solution in general relativity that are called wormholes. And again, it’s not science fiction, this is just right off the shelf, standard textbook, General Relativity applications. So what that means is a reduced time in interstellar travel is not as skeptics would say you can’t get from there to here, advanced ET civilizations now or ourselves in the future, are not fundamentally constrained by physical principles. The exotic physics for such can be addressed in engineering terms sort of metric engineering as it were. Does this have any help? Again, by the way, this paper also was published as one of the Defense Intelligence reference documents. And since we were permitted to publish in the open literature, I published that paper in a British interplanetary science journal and engineering journal. So if you’re interested in looking at the details, you can learn as much as you want to know about metric engineering. And that helped us understand some of the aspects. I mean, you may have heard the phrase, dent stars, you get redshift. Well, turns out in this engineering technology, you get so called blue shift, that is, frequencies are up shifted to higher frequencies. So for example, in this room, so for example, in this room, most of the radiation coming off our bodies, off the walls and so on, is in fact, in the infrared.
And what we see things in the visible range. But what happens if you get into a volume of space where the vacuum has been engineered in the way I’ve been discussing, it turns out, you get a blue shift. So in fact, the infrared you don’t ordinarily see can get blue shifted up into the visible, so it’s not surprising that all these craft should be so luminous. Now, the downside from all of this is the fact that visible light, which doesn’t have any particularly harmful effects, gets blue shifted up into the ultraviolet, so you get too close to landed craft, you might get a sunburn, or off into the soft X-ray region. So the chance of radiation poisoning. So if you run across one of these sitting on the ground, I would recommend you don’t and is powered up. I’d recommend you don’t rush up and well, that helped us to understand we as part of this program, we looked at some cases that were really good from Brazil 77 – 78. It was like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1000 pages of documents all done by the Brazilian Air Force investigative team, 500 photographs, 15 hours of motion film, a lot of medical injuries. I know you probably can’t read that from here, but just a list of the different kinds of medical injuries that occurred when people encountered these craft at close range. And it has some overlap with cases that we’ve investigated during the program of injuries occurring. Well, despite the progress in the AATIP program, let’s face it, the topic is inherently anomalous, right? Therefore, despite the reality of the observations, and all the people that we interact with in the intelligence community, and the Pentagon agree, the data is there, it’s real. Nonetheless, the topic doesn’t fit smoothly into known profiles of government programs for sure. And by virtual natural security implications is high compartmentalization, the topic, therefore slow pace of human progress and integration, we call them stovepipes. You have a lot of people with lots of detailed information about some particular aspect, but they don’t talk to each other. Even if it’s sitting at the next desk. And let’s face it, advocacy of the issue in government circles is viewed as career enhancing. In part because, despite the weirdness of the subject, if you don’t make a lot of progress, you know, it doesn’t look good on your resume that you’re moving up the line. So because of that, there’s a forward story. Many of us involved in the program decided that there should be an outreach program in the public sector. So this is the forward story. The goal was to establish a broad based high quality scientific community of interest in the public sector, concerning these unidentified aerial phenomena and other related leading edge topics. And so we got together and formed a company called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. It was co-founded by entrepreneur, Tom DeLonge. I’ll talk about him in a minute. Senior intelligence officers from the Department of Defense and CIA, and distinguished research scientists, we all banded together to form this academy. It was set up as a public benefit corporation. So the public can invest and therefore it’s owned by the public. So this is something new, whatever comes out of any of the research, or any release of information is actually going to be owned by the public, it’s not going to disappear into a black hole. Very transparent structure. If you go to the website, you can see everything from the financial structure to the activities. And we do have a web based community of interest where things get posted. For example, this F-18 FLIR tape I show we now have three of them up there. Probably more to come. Alright, what are the principles of this organization? Tom DeLonge. Blink 182 rock star. Frankly, I’d never heard of Blink 182.
But my son told me Oh, yeah, we know about Blink 182. But anyway, in addition to being the rock star that he is, he’s also a director and producer who puts out books and music and film and so on. And he’s had a lifelong interest in the UFO area. And so he started talking with various people, and he was kind of the, I guess you’d say the action oriented person who said, Why don’t we set up something Why don’t we make this more available to the public? And he got to a number of us, and so we all began to band together. Lue Elizondo, who was in fact, the Department of Defense’s the Pentagon’s AATIP Program Director, resigned from the Pentagon and joined us. Chris Mellon 20 year career Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for intelligence minority staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He joins us now we got Jim Semivan 25 year career in CIA, he’s director of operation. He was the real James Bond kind of guy. Steve Justice, just retired as program director for the billion dollar programs at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. He joined us and then I agreed to be on the board. So I joined them. In addition to my science and engineering background, I’ve had a lot of activity and in classified areas. So it was a natural fit for me interacting with all these people. We also put together a policy and scientific advisory panel of the best people we could find. Chris Mellon agreed to be the chair. Dr. Colm Kelleher. He was actually the deputy administrator at Bigelow Aerospace to run the AATIP program out of the Pentagon. Dr. Gary Nolan, top genetics professor at Stanford University. Dr. Khan 30 year career with CIA counter biological weapons program, Dr. Rapp professor of military and emergency medicine Uniformed Services University, Dr. Gilpin is a consultant in academic biomedical research, research law, so we put together a team as panelists to keep us on the straight and narrow have really taught people who have wonderful backgrounds and really want to see scientific work be done in this area. So the goals for the to the stars Academy are to promote the concept that such forefront topics as UFO, SETI, consciousness studies, even that telepathy and psychokinesis should not be considered taboo for serious scientific consideration. So I mean, it’s a perfect match to the SSC because that’s our goal in the SSC as well. And, of course, big ideas to generate funding to underwrite significant research in these areas. Develop user friendly data databases. So, information that is generated can be accessed by anyone, providing positive support for collaborative government, aerospace, industry and academic efforts to accomplish all of the above. So we want to act as the glue in the public sector, and create entertainment properties, books and documentaries and so on so that whatever is learned can be generated and jobs can be delivered out to the public. And the structure of the organizations has a science structure, aerospace structure and entertainment division. What are the activities of this organization to date, actually, we were responsible for legitimising the topic in the mainstream press. That story that came out in the New York Times and so on, which then got picked up by Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, was based on agreed upon interviews with those of us that I’ve just gone through a list of and given the quality of the sources coming out from the shadows, for example, ex Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, top F-18, pilots, significant Department of Defense and intelligence community officials, the bar has been raised on legitimization of this topic, in the public arena, we think that’s an accomplished goal to date.
And via the community of interest postings on the website, we now have three, high quality to fit in videotapes of unidentified aerial phenomenon counters, they’ve been previously languishing in the Pentagon servers, nobody doing that much with them. These are still being generated. One of the tapes is from 2016, off the east coast of the United States. I mean, there are a lot more types, hopefully, we’ll get a lot more of them posted. We only don’t just produce positive results, what people would think would be supportive results. One of our scientists, science advisors is Gary Nolan from Stanford University, who’s a genetic genetics expert. And there had been claims that some small humanoid skeleton found in Chile, so called Atacama humanoid, might be ET. You can see why somebody might think that if you see the structure, but anyway, Nolan, and people from other universities put together a complete genetics thing, and did the entire genome and found that, in fact, No, unfortunately, this is not evidence of ET. It’s a deformed human. And so that’s up on the website, if you want to read the paper, it was published in one of the top genetics journals, very well, peer reviewed. And meetings are being set up with people from other countries, because other countries who also have materials don’t necessarily want to give them to the US government because they disappear in a black hole, and they never learn anything. But given our commitment, as a public benefit corporation, that’s not going to happen with us. They’re now talking to us. And we’re collaborating on obtaining materials from foreign countries.
And of course, we’re negotiating with media outlets to get all this out in the public in the form of documentaries or TV shows or whatever. So basically, that’s the backstory. I’m a forward story. And I’m glad to answer any questions, I’ll answer any that I can.
Thank you.
Dr. Hal Puthoff, June 9, 2018 presentation in Las Vegas, NV
